Chapter One When Lena climbs off the bus in the predawn dark of a small mountain town she doesn’t know the name of, she’s not thinking about her home now some seven hundred miles behind her; she’s not thinking…
John and Lara’s daughter had up and married a perfect stranger. She’d met the fellow at a gallery opening only two weeks before. The nuptials had taken place in a courthouse. On the phone Liza told them sure, of…
Everyone is coughing behind a mask. The papers warn that the only way to avoid the sweeping sickness is to limit contact, but kids are still playing together in the streets because October in Cloquet, Minnesota is rarely this…
There’s an air-raid shelter in the backyard. It was built in the fifties, back when such things were fashionable, back when, if your neighbors didn’t have one, you made it clear to them that at the sight of that…
By Alyson Mosquera Dutemple • Long before we discover that the main character, a little boy named Harry, will drown in the final moments of Flannery O’Connor’s “The River,” we are unsettled while reading the story. On the surface,…
